Monday, August 31, 2015

Legal scholars who criticize U.S. tactics against terrorists are
committing treasonous acts in support of an enemy, and they and the law
schools that employ them should be regarded as “lawful targets” for
military attacks, a law professor at the U.S. Military Academy at West
Point argued in an article published recently by a student-edited law
journal.
The article, “Trahison des Professeurs: The Critical Law of Armed
Conflict / Academy as an Islamist Fifth Column,” appeared in the Spring/Summer 2015 issue of the National Security Law Journal, based at George Mason University, in Virginia. The journal has since repudiated the article and apologized to readers for publishing it.

It’s 4 p.m. at a university medical
center. A team of doctors, nurses, social workers, and administrators
gathers to discuss best practices for patient care. A voice cuts in: "I
felt as if everyone was rushing in the radiology department. That’s when
I felt really uncomfortable." The voice belongs to a patient. Her
comment shifts the conversation — abstract until now — to a new focus:
this particular patient’s experience. Patients’ voices — once
marginalized in medicine’s hierarchical structures — now help shape
medicine in meaningful ways.
Like patients offered the chance to participate in their own care,
graduate students should have a voice in the future of higher education.
The point here is not that doctoral students are like patients — most
good pedagogies begin by dismantling such an idea — but that
participants with little power within an organization can be a vital
resource of information and insight.

A University of Florida professor who accepted a $25,000 grant from the
agriculture giant Monsanto will give the money to a campus food pantry
after he was criticized by activists who oppose the use of genetically
modified organisms, or GMOs. The Gainesville Sunreports
that Kevin Folta, chairman of the university’s horticultural-sciences
department, tried to give the money back but Monsanto wouldn’t take it.
Calling the pressure he’s felt from anti-GMO activists “terrorism,” Mr.
Folta said he didn’t want them to have an excuse to say he was beholden
to Monsanto. Mr. Folta received the unrestricted grant to fund a
biotech-communications project.

The pros and cons of literary fame date
back to antiquity. Cicero thought superior writers, or their souls,
would survive death and enter an eternal realm "where eminent and
excellent men find their true reward." Ovid assured his wife that she
would "live for all time in my song." Horace, proud of his reputation as
a lyric poet, bragged that he was "pointed out by passers-by." His
friend Virgil, however — if we trust Suetonius — ducked into buildings
to avoid fans.
Despite Virgil’s presumed ambivalence, the notion that all literary
writers crave fame — the contemporary kind, the immortal kind, or both —
remains a cultural cliché. It’s one that H.J. Jackson, professor
emerita at the University of Toronto and distinguished scholar of
18th-century and Romantic British literature, places at the heart of Those Who Write for Immortality, her spirited and always enlightening meditation on literary fame that cites the pros and cons above.

A decade ago, John P.A. Ioannidis published a provocative and much-discussed paper arguing that most published research findings are false. It’s starting to look like he was right.
The results of the Reproducibility Project
are in, and the news is not good. The goal of the project was to
attempt to replicate findings in 100 studies from three leading
psychology journals published in the year 2008. The very ambitious
endeavor, led by Brian Nosek, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and executive director of the Center for Open Science,
brought together more than 270 researchers who tried to follow the same
methods as the original researchers — in essence, double-checking their
work by painstakingly re-creating it.

The Chronicle of Higher EducationAugust 31st, 2015
Nuance is revered in higher education. That’s especially true in
sociology, where scholars spend their lives digging into the fine grain
of human social behavior, often finding even finer grain underneath.
Which is why it came as such a surprise — and perhaps a relief — when
Kieran Healy, an associate professor of sociology at Duke University,
last week brought a blunt message to the American Sociological
Association’s annual meeting: "Fuck Nuance."
That is the title of a paper he presented at the conference and later uploaded to his website. "Seriously, fuck it," explains the paper’s abstract.

Thursday, August 27, 2015

The National Labor Relations Board
in Washington on Thursday made it substantially easier for unions to
bargain for higher wages and benefits, opening the door for organized
workers at fast-food chains and other franchises to negotiate with
corporations like McDonald’s and Yum Brands, rather than with individual
restaurants, where they might have a harder time achieving their goals.

“This
is about, if employees decide they want to bargain collectively, who
can be required to come to the bargaining table to have negotiations
that are meaningful,” said Wilma B. Liebman, a former N.L.R.B.
chairwoman who wrote a crucial dissent in a 2002 case on the subject.

A regional National Labor Relations Board office said Wednesday that
adjuncts at Manhattan College may count their union election votes. The
ballots have been impounded since 2011, when the Roman Catholic college
objected to NLRB jurisdiction over its campus, citing its religious
affiliation. The case was pending before the NLRB in Washington until
earlier this year, when the board sent the Manhattan adjunct union case
and a handful of others
involving would-be adjunct unions at religious colleges back to their
regional NLRB offices for re-evaluation based on the recent Pacific
Lutheran University decision. In that case, the NLRB said that adjuncts
who wanted to form a Service Employees International Union-affiliated
collective bargaining unit could do so, because their service to the
institution was not sufficiently religious in nature to conflict with
the National Labor Relations Act giving workers the right to organize.

Non-tenure-track faculty members are the majority of the teaching
force, so what are colleges and universities doing to help them develop
as teachers? As for many issues related to adjuncts, there’s a
significant data gap on the topic -- in part because adjuncts are
diverse and decentralized, making them hard to study. But a new survey
out of the University of Louisville seeks to close the gap, and early
responses provide insight into how colleges and universities’ teaching
and learning centers are supporting their part-time faculty members --
or not.
“We want to know what’s really going on out there,” said Roy Fuller, a
part-time faculty fellow at Louisville’s Delphi Center for Teaching and
Learning and co-leader of a new survey of teaching and learning
center-sponsored professional development opportunities for adjuncts.
“This is really important.”

Four-year public colleges and universities have increased their education-related spending even as overall funding has declined.
The revenue declines are due to lowering state contributions. And
while public universities have raised tuition rates to make up for large
state funding losses, they have not fully offset the difference with
tuition hikes.
Those are the findings from a new analysisthe
Association of Public & Land-grant Universities (APLU) has
released. The report looked at revenue and spending on a per-student
basis at 621 public four-year institutions between 2007 and 2013,
including at 193 APLU member universities. The association's members
include public research universities, land-grand institutions and state
university systems.

As Democrats on the presidential campaign trail pitch their college
affordability plans to voters, they are largely united in their calls
for a big boost in federal spending on higher education.
Following a monthslong effort by liberal groups to push “debt-free college” -- and after President Obama’s call
for free community college earlier this year -- leading Democratic
presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders both now have
proposals that would expand the role of the federal government in higher education.
At the heart of both plans is a new federal-state matching program
that would send billions of dollars to states and colleges with the goal
of seeing tuition slashed or eliminated at public colleges and
universities.

Going to lunch with students changed Michael Wesch’s attitude about
teaching, and he is trying to share his personal transformation through a
series of videos he hopes will go viral.
Mr. Wesch is an associate professor of cultural anthropology at
Kansas State University who has won some of the highest honors for his
work in the classroom, including a national professor-of-the-year award
in 2008. Yet a couple of years ago, he "got into a funk" about
teaching, he says. After many years covering the same material, he was
worried things were getting too routine.

At the University of Missouri at Columbia, long simmering concerns over
poor working conditions for graduate students have boiled over.
On Wednesday, several hundred graduate students, faculty members, and
other protesters marched on the campus to push the administration to
raise stipend levels, offer better housing and child-care options, and
make other improvements. Rallying under the iconic columns at the
university’s Traditions Plaza, the crowd chanted "M-I-Z, shame on you,"
with many wearing red T-shirts with slogans that supported the graduate
students’ cause.
The uproar began earlier this month after university officials told
students that because of changes in federal policy they would no longer
receive health-insurance subsidies, a message sent out only hours before
the benefits were set to expire.

Wednesday, August 26, 2015

A regional official of the National Labor Relations Board has ordered
the tallying of ballots in a union election for Manhattan College’s
part-time faculty members. She based her decision on a finding that such
instructors do not contribute to the religious environment of the Roman
Catholic college enough to be excluded from the board’s jurisdiction
for First Amendment reasons.
Karen P. Fernbach, director of the NLRB’s regional office in New York, said in the decision
on Wednesday that she had found no evidence that such instructors are
expected to advance the college’s religious mission “other than to
respect and support it.” As a result, she said, the federal board can
assert jurisdiction over the union election there without treading on
the college’s religious freedom under the First Amendment.

The "Administrators Are People Too"
piece in IHE was quite good on its own terms, but I was struck at how
quickly the comments inadvertently confirmed its thesis. There's a level
of self-righteous vituperation out there that goes far beyond anything
that could be explained by the doings of any one provost or dean. It
comes from something much deeper. And for newbies who cross over from
faculty, the depth and persistence of that vituperation can be
disorienting.
Having crossed that divide myself, and having worked with others who have, a few thoughts to offer newbies.
First, understand that "the administration" is a synecdoche for all
external forces, or for anything that compels a professor to do
something she'd rather not do. The state cuts funding and enrollment
drops, so the college loses revenue; that's largely invisible to many
faculty. But you put a cap on travel, and you're the bad guy. That may
have been the best move available to you, but many folks won't see the
options you had to choose from; they'll only see the one you chose. "But
I made the least-bad choice!" may be true, but many won't care. Social
psychologists call that the "fundamental attribution error:" we
attribute actions to personal characteristics, rather than to the
options available at the time.

Tuition-discount rates at private, nonprofit colleges have once again
hit an all-time high, and appear to be holding down net tuition
revenue, according to preliminary estimates from the National
Association of College and University Business Officers’ annual survey.
The projected discount rates for 2014 are 48 percent for first-time full-time freshmen and 41.6 percent for all undergraduates.
That’s likely to be the most attention-grabbing finding from the association’s latest Tuition Discounting Study,
released on Tuesday. While rising discount rates are often seen as a
warning sign for the sector, the other data in the report, based on
responses from 411 colleges belonging to the association, may present
even grimmer evidence of financial challenges ahead.

Alice Dreger doesn’t usually pull punches. So it’s no surprise that her resignation letter is more, shall we say, direct than the average two weeks’ notice.
Ms. Dreger resigned this week from Northwestern University, where she
was a clinical professor of medical humanities and bioethics, a
nontenured gig she’d had for the past decade. In her letter, she writes
that when she started at Northwestern, the university vigorously
defended her academic freedom. Now, she contends, that’s no longer the
case.
What prompted her departure was the fallout over an article
by William Peace, who at the time was a visiting professor in the
humanities at Syracuse University. Mr. Peace wrote an essay for an issue
of the journal, Atrium, that Ms. Dreger guest-edited. The
essay is a frank account of a nurse who helped Mr. Peace regain his
sexual function after he was paralyzed.

A second faculty member has resigned from Northwestern University
over its medical school’s reaction to a provocative article published in
a faculty journal.
“It’s so petty -- that’s what I kept saying -- it’s a frickin’ blow
job in 1978,” said Alice Dreger, a professor of medical humanities and
bioethics at Northwestern who gave her notice this week over the alleged
ongoing censorship of the university medical humanities faculty journal
Atrium, which has suspended publication after a funding cut.
“Of course, it wound up as the Streisand effect, where everybody pays attention,” Dreger added.

Community colleges across Tennessee are starting their academic year
with many students who may have never thought they would attend an
institution of higher learning, but who are taking advantage of the
Tennessee Promise program, which offers them a free two-year college
education.
Although official numbers won't be available until after the 14th day
of enrollment, Tennessee Promise has 22,534 college freshmen as of the
last August deadline to remain in the program, said Mike Krause,
executive director of Tennessee Promise, the signature program of
Governor Bill Haslam, a Republican.

Tuesday, August 25, 2015

The Chronicle of Higher EducationAugust 24th, 2015
Forty-one campus leaders at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign have signed an open letter calling on the institution
to hire Steven G. Salaita, whose appointment to a professorship was nixed last year over the scholar’s anti-Israel tweets.
The message comes after a tumultuous few weeks for the campus. Earlier this month, a federal court ruled
that the university had broken its contractual obligations with Mr.
Salaita by declining to hire him. Then the campus’s chancellor, Phyllis
M. Wise, suddenly announced she would step down. Later in the week, it came to light that Ms. Wise and other officials had used personal email accounts to communicate secretly about the Salaita case and other topics, in violation of state open-records law.

If, in these hectic first days of the semester, you’ve been spending your time on Twitter, you’ve probably seen the funny “First Faculty Meeting of the Year Bingo,” written by Lisa Nikolidakis for McSweeney’s. If you haven’t, go there for a good laugh.
Catharsis achieved. The bingo ballot certainly sounds like an
accurate portrayal of higher-ed rhetoric, but is it? There’s only one
way to find out: By asking our audience of faculty members to print out the lovely McSweeney’s ballot,
take it to their first faculty meeting of the year, mark it up, then
send it to us. So that’s what we’re asking you to do. You know, if you
want.

We medievalists have had a pretty good
run in academe. We were admitted in the final third of the 19th century
after we proved that our subject was complex (read: science-like) enough
to warrant professionalized study. European nations’ desire for
origins, to use the title phrase in Allen J. Frantzen’s influential
book, helped expand the field into the second half of the 20th century.
Even in America, although her very existence was predicated on leaving
"old" Europe behind, academic work on various medieval heritages thrived
to the point where every humanities department boasted at least one
medieval specialist.
However, there is now a manifest discrepancy between the large number of students who request that we address their love of Harry Potter,Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, and
medieval-themed video and computer games on the one hand, and the
decreasing number of medievalists hired to replace retiring colleagues
on the other. We are no longer protected by our involvement in
preserving European heritages, an involvement often joined up with
primordialist, jingoist, and colonialist mentalities discredited in the
Western world by the 1970s. And we are as endangered as the rest of our
humanities colleagues by the advent of new areas of scholarship, the
intimidating popularity of the STEM disciplines, and politically
motivated cuts to the liberal arts.

In May, when Saida Grundy found herself being skewered by the
conservative blogosphere, Fox News and others, she made a point not to
read or listen to most of the commentary. "I was afraid to Google
myself," she said in an interview here. Some friends forwarded material,
and Grundy couldn't avoid it altogether, she said, but she didn't want
to get consumed by the commentary.
"So many caring people told me that they couldn't imagine what it
would be like to start [on the tenure track] immediately after" the
onslaught, she said. "But I still really don't fully understand the
scope of it."
That she didn't read everything may make it easier for her, she said,
to keep the focus where it should be for a new assistant professor, in
her case in sociology at Boston University. She's thinking about a book
built on her dissertation. She's planning her classes.

Colleges and universities lure top faculty members away from
competitor institutions all the time, and the practice is (generally
speaking) entirely legal. But while some relish it,
others consider faculty poaching, or actively recruiting faculty
members from competitors, bad form and try to avoid doing it regularly
-- especially to institutions in the same geographic area.
A new antitrust lawsuit alleges much more than a neighborly
understanding between Duke University and the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, however. The suit, brought against Duke by a
medical faculty member there, rather alleges a binding no-hire agreement
between the two Research Triangle institutions prevented her from
getting a job at Carolina that otherwise would have been hers. The
faculty member alleges there are others like her, and she’s proposed a
class action.

When I moved into administration after being a professor, a colleague
who had made the same move years before told me to brace for the loss
of my faculty friends.
Impossible, I argued -- we attended regular Friday cocktail hours,
had fought and won battles across campus, supported each other across
the thorny paths leading to tenure and promotion. We’d been through it
all, and those are precisely the kinds of experiences that make for
lasting relationships.
I was wrong. My colleague was right.
About this time in my career, I began noticing for the first time the
term “incivility” in higher ed news. Perhaps I noticed it because for
the first time, it rang true. Where once I had been respected as a
caring teacher and a hardworking colleague, I was now viewed with
suspicion.

Thursday, August 20, 2015

As we approach a new academic year, graduate students, postdocs,
adjuncts and others are eyeing the job market warily and wondering, How do I get a tenure-track job? Here are a dozen pieces of advice to help get you to the interview and, with luck, onto the tenure track.1. Publish everything. A conference paper is half an
essay (or chapter). Once you’ve given your presentation, develop a full
version and send it out to a peer-reviewed publication. Or if it’s part
of a book, write the rest of the chapter.2. Sustain production. In one respect, building a CV
is a simple mathematical equation: if you publish two articles per
year, in five years you’ll have 10 articles. The specific annual number
is up to you. As a graduate student or young scholar, if you’re able to
publish one article per year, that’s truly superb. The larger point is
that if you maintain a rate of production, then -- over time -- the
numbers add up and your CV grows. When a hiring committee faces a stack
of applications, candidates who have more publications stand out.

The faculty union for the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education
has gone to state court to seek an injunction to block the system from
starting background checks on all employees, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
reported. Union leaders say that state law requires only that those who
teach or work with minors be subject to background checks, and that
most professors do not teach or work with minors. Union leaders also
note that the law doesn't count as a minor those who are enrolled at a
college or visiting a college as a prospective student. But university
leaders say that all campus employees should have background checks
because many minors visit campuses for summer programs or other events.

Will Brooker is studying David Bowie by trying to live like him for a year.
A fan since he was a teenager, the professor of film and cultural
studies at Kingston University has been commissioned to write a
monograph about the singer. A number of false starts led to his “drawing
up lists about what Bowie engaged with culturally. That was my entry
point. I am trying to understand his state of mind by immersing myself
in his life.”
Proceeding chronologically through decades of Bowie’s career from the
late 1960s, Brooker has visited Brixton, Bromley and Beckenham and plans
to go to Berlin next month. He is reading William Burroughs, Aleister
Crowley, Michael Morcock and Friedrich Nietzsche. And he is listening to
what Bowie would have heard in different eras (and no music that has
been created since).

Students in Ronald A. Yaros’s Info 3.0 class at the University of
Maryland at College Park this fall will use a smartphone app
specifically designed for practically everything in the course: Writing
blog posts, sending tweets, and shooting video interviews.
Mr. Yaros doesn’t allow laptop computers in his classroom but not
because he doesn’t expect students to look at screens. Instead, he asks
them to bring a tablet computer or use their smartphones to follow along
with his interactive demonstrations during class, which he can beam to
their devices using another app, called Nearpod. With a swipe of the
finger on his iPad, the screens on his students’ devices change as well.
In addition to slides, he pulls up work the students have done in the
week since their last meeting, as well as asks open-ended questions,
polls them, and shares PDFs on the small screen.

WHO do you think received more cash from Yale’s endowment last year: Yale students, or the private equity fund managers hired to invest the university’s money?

It’s not even close.

Last
year, Yale paid about $480 million to private equity fund managers as
compensation — about $137 million in annual management fees, and another
$343 million in performance fees, also known as carried interest — to
manage about $8 billion, one-third of Yale’s endowment.

In
contrast, of the $1 billion the endowment contributed to the
university’s operating budget, only $170 million was earmarked for
tuition assistance, fellowships and prizes. Private equity fund managers
also received more than students at four other endowments I researched:
Harvard, the University of Texas, Stanford and Princeton.

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

Americans have grown more supportive of labor unions in recent years, according to a Gallup poll released Monday. The poll found that nearly 6 in 10 Americans say they approve of labor unions, the highest approval rate since 2008.Gallup has been surveying American
opinion on organized labor since 1936. Approval has jumped five
percentage points in the last year alone, and 10 percentage points since
2008. Desire for more union influence is also up. Thirty-seven percent
of Americans say they want unions to have more influence, while 35
percent want to see unions wield less influence. By comparison, in
2009, only 25 percent of respondents said they wanted more influence, and 42 percent wanted less.

When I was an undergraduate at Antioch College in the early ’80s, I
took a course in philosophical anthropology. I’m still not entirely sure
what "philosophical anthropology" means, but it was the best course I
ever had. It did more to prepare me for graduate school and my career
than any other course, and it was edge-of-your-seat,
lean-across-the-table interesting. The problem is that the professor,
Victor Ayoub, has retired, and committees in the modern world rarely
approve courses like his.
The syllabus was about half a page in length. There were no course
objectives, and the professor didn’t list his instructional activities
or his grading procedures. What filled the half-page was a list of five
or six books we would read during the semester and a sentence or two
informing students that they would be expected to complete a research
paper — the first part of which was due near the middle of the semester,
with the rest being due at the end.

On a Sunday evening in July, Robin S. Engel was watching her daughter’s basketball game when her phone rang. It was the police.
A man had just been shot, an assistant chief of the Cincinnati Police
Department told her. It happened near the University of Cincinnati,
where Ms. Engel worked as a professor of criminal justice. The shooter
was a university police officer.
The professor’s phone beeped. It was another city police commander,
this time a district captain, who also wanted to keep Ms. Engel in the
loop. Before long, she learned about the victim. His name was Samuel
DuBose. He was 43 years old, black, and unarmed. And he was dead.

The National Labor Relations Board decided on Monday to reject a bid
by football players at Northwestern University to form a union.
More than a year after the five-member board took up the issue, it released a unanimous decision
saying that the board was "declining to assert jurisdiction" in the
case because allowing athletes at a private university to organize would
not "promote stability in labor markets."
The board did not rule on the core issue of whether athletes who receive grant-in-aid scholarships are employees,
seeming to leave open the possibility that other groups of student
athletes could attempt to organize a union. However, experts in labor
law and college athletics say the board was simply dodging a difficult
issue and possibly even making it harder for similar groups to unionize
in the future.

A common complaint from professors concerns students’ endless
questions about topics that are covered on the syllabus. I have been
teaching for over a decade and recall only one such incident. So while I
appreciate that such questions would be irritating, I cannot relate to
them. As with many aspects of teaching, it is possible to approach the
syllabus in a myriad of ways. Here I share my related practices with the
hopes that others can end up with fewer questions about issues that are
already addressed on their syllabi.
My caveat here is that most of my classes are relatively small,
creating the types of classroom settings that lend themselves well to
conversations between students and the instructor much more than big
lecture classes. That said, some of the points I discuss should work
regardless of class size. For those that do not, I offer some
alternatives.

The president of the University of Akron, Scott L. Scarborough, on
Monday issued a statement pledging continued support to the University
of Akron Press. The university has been saying that for several weeks
now, but many on campus and off have been doubtful because the
university eliminated the jobs of all press employees.
Since then, the university has named a professor to lead the press, and
Scarborough's statement said that two employees of the press would have
their jobs restored. Further, he pledged not only to keep the contract
obligations of the press, as he has previously, but to "seek out new,
high-quality works."
Reaction was mixed, with several observers who have advocated for the
press asking not to be quoted by name. They said generally that they
applauded the statement, but many have lost trust in university leaders,
so they were not prepared to celebrate.

As speculation continues about the reasons for Arvind Gupta’s abrupt resignation
from the University of British Columbia presidency after one year in
office, one professor whose blog post speculating that his skin color
(brown) and advocacy for minority and female academics in leadership
might have something to do with it has written a follow-up post
describing what she characterizes as an institutional attempt to silence
her.
Her account of the attempt -- and the UBC board chair's role in it --
has heightened faculty concerns about governance at UBC following
Gupta's unexplained resignation.
It started when Jennifer Berdahl published a blog post last week titled, “Did President Arvind Gupta Lose the Masculinity Contest?”
In that post Berdahl acknowledged that she did not know the “ins and
outs” of the reasons for Gupta’s departure. “But what I do have are my
personal observations and experiences after my first year here as the
inaugural Montalbano Professor of Leadership Studies: Gender and
Diversity,” Berdahl’s post says. “I believe that part of this outcome is
that Arvind Gupta lost the masculinity contest among the leadership at
UBC, as most women and minorities do at institutions dominated by white
men.”

The National Labor Relations Board on Monday declined to assert jurisdiction over whether football players at Northwestern University may form a union.
The NLRB's vaguely written decision ends the drive to unionize at
Northwestern, but left higher education, sports and labor experts
divided on whether the ruling kills all efforts to unionize college
football or just slows the movement down. In its order, the NLRB stated
that it was not judging the merits of the players’ argument, and that
the board could later return to the issue.
"The board went to great lengths to make sure the decision is very
much limited in this instance to Northwestern and to college football
players," said Dan Johns, a lawyer who leads Ballard Spahr's Higher Education Group
and who specializes in labor organizing efforts at colleges. "But the
board's underlying reasoning here makes it difficult to see another team
having success."

Monday, August 17, 2015

Late last month, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case
that could deliver a fatal blow to the financial health of
already-imperiled public-employee unions. In Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, Rebecca Friedrichs,
a public school teacher in Orange County, along with nine other
teachers and the Christian Educators Association, filed a suit objecting
to the agency, or “fair share,” fees they’re required to pay to the
CTA.

As it currently stands, California teachers cannot be forced
to join the CTA, which the Supreme Court has ruled would violate the
freedom of association guaranteed by the First Amendment. But even those
teachers who decline union membership must still pay a fee to cover the
cost of “collective bargaining, contract administration, and grievance
adjustment purposes,” a compromise established in 1977 by a unanimous
Supreme Court ruling in the similar-looking Abood v. Detroit Board of Education.

A few weeks ago, I received an email
from a reporter at a popular magazine, asking to interview me about a current
event: the publication of Harper Lee’s new book, Go Set a Watchman, and
the apparent downfall of Atticus Finch as an American hero. I agreed to the
interview. When the reporter called, before she could begin the interview, I
asked her a question: “How did you find me?” I figured she saw something I
wrote on Twitter
or on my
blog.

She said she found me through my
research.

Many years ago, back when I was
still a professor, I published an article on To Kill a Mockingbird that
took a controversial, critical stance on Atticus Finch. Based on that research,
the reporter believed I would be a good expert to interview about the new
controversy surrounding the character.

A
few weeks ago, I received an email from a reporter at a popular
magazine, asking to interview me about a current event: the publication
of Harper Lee’s new book, Go Set a Watchman, and the apparent
downfall of Atticus Finch as an American hero. I agreed to the
interview. When the reporter called, before she could begin the
interview, I asked her a question: “How did you find me?” I figured she
saw something I wrote on Twitter or on my blog.
She said she found me through my research.
Many years ago, back when I was still a professor, I published an article on To Kill a Mockingbird
that took a controversial, critical stance on Atticus Finch. Based on
that research, the reporter believed I would be a good expert to
interview about the new controversy surrounding the character.
- See more at: https://chroniclevitae.com/news/1100-freelance-academics-as-public-intellectuals#sthash.xX7t2arj.dpuf

A
few weeks ago, I received an email from a reporter at a popular
magazine, asking to interview me about a current event: the publication
of Harper Lee’s new book, Go Set a Watchman, and the apparent
downfall of Atticus Finch as an American hero. I agreed to the
interview. When the reporter called, before she could begin the
interview, I asked her a question: “How did you find me?” I figured she
saw something I wrote on Twitter or on my blog.
She said she found me through my research.
Many years ago, back when I was still a professor, I published an article on To Kill a Mockingbird
that took a controversial, critical stance on Atticus Finch. Based on
that research, the reporter believed I would be a good expert to
interview about the new controversy surrounding the character.
- See more at: https://chroniclevitae.com/news/1100-freelance-academics-as-public-intellectuals#sthash.xX7t2arj.dpuf

The National Labor Relations Board
on Monday dismissed a petition by Northwestern football players who
were seeking to unionize, effectively denying their claim that they are
university employees and should be allowed to collectively bargain. In a unanimous decision
that was a clear victory for the college sports establishment, the
five-member board declined to exert its jurisdiction in the case and
preserved, for now, one of the N.C.A.A.’s core principles: that college
athletes are primarily students.

The Board did not directly rule on the central question in the case —
whether the players, who spend long hours on football and help generate
millions of dollars for Northwestern, are university employees. Instead,
it found the novelty of the petition and its potentially wide-ranging
impacts on college sports would not have promoted “stability in the
labor market.” Citing competitive balance and the potential impact on
N.C.A.A. rules, the board made clear it harbored many reservations about
the ramifications of granting college athletes, much less a single
team, collective bargaining rights.

Nearly six in 10 Americans have a favorable view of labor unions, according to the results of a new Gallup survey released Monday.
Approval
of unions jumped to 58 percent this year, an increase of five
percentage points from 2014, though still well below the 75 percent
organized labor enjoyed in the early 1950s but greater than the 48
percent who approved in 2009 in the grips of the recession.

Overall, 37 percent of Americans said they wanted unions to
have more influence on the political process, while 35 percent wanted
less influence and 24 percent wanted more of the same. The percentage of
Americans saying they want more union influence on politics has
slightly risen since 2009, with a similar share among Americans wanting
less labor influence declining.

Sandi walks up to you, the steward,
just as the hallways start filling with noisy high schoolers heading for the
bus. She is ready to blow her top, and over the din she tells you her
supervisor is demanding that she continue driving special education students in
her own car—long a part of her job as a teaching assistant—despite a recent
warning from her insurance agent that she’s not covered for it.

“He told me if I refuse to drive,
I’m fired,” she says. “I’ve been in this job seven years, never any problem.
Can he do that?”

You’ve been a steward long enough to
know the routine. You ask Sandi: “Why don’t you write up the facts of what
happened? Include what your supervisor said, what led up to the conversation,
whether there were witnesses. Include what your insurance agent said, your job
description, how long you’ve been driving.

Sandi
walks up to you, the steward, just as the hallways start filling with
noisy high schoolers heading for the bus. She is ready to blow her top,
and over the din she tells you her supervisor is demanding that she
continue driving special education students in her own car—long a part
of her job as a teaching assistant—despite a recent warning from her
insurance agent that she’s not covered for it.
“He told me if I refuse to drive, I’m fired,” she says. “I’ve been in this job seven years, never any problem. Can he do that?”
You’ve been a steward long enough to know the routine. You ask Sandi:
“Why don’t you write up the facts of what happened? Include what your
supervisor said, what led up to the conversation, whether there were
witnesses. Include what your insurance agent said, your job description,
how long you’ve been driving.
- See more at: http://www.labornotes.org/2015/08/turning-issue-campaign#sthash.WN3gbYH8.dpuf